The present invention relates to an improved idiophone, and more particularly relates to improvement in tone quality of musical tones produced by an idiophone such as a tambourine.
A tambourine is a typical example of an idiophone. A tambourine in general includes an annular shell having several radially through windows circumferentially spaced from each other at an equal interval and several pairs of metallic jingles arranged in the windows. One or more resonator chambers may be optionally formed in the frame at sections between adjacent windows. More specifically, each window is spanned by a fixed carrier rod which extends substantially normal to the plane of circularity of the annular shell and a pair of metallic jingles are idly inserted over the carrier rod at their centers.
When the head of the tambourine is bashed or the tambourine is shaken by the player's hand, musical tones are generated by mutual collision of the metallic jingles and/or collision of the metallic jingles with the walls of each window fixing the carrier rod.
This tone generating mechanism is based on the three-point collision of the metallic jingles only and, as a consequence, rather poor in acoustic variety.
Further, such a poor acoustic variety is additionally caused by the fact that each pair of jingles are made of a same material. This in particular degrades richness in tone quality.
It is the basic object of the present invention to provide an idiophone generative of musical tones with rich acoustic variety.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an idiophone generative of musical tones of rich tonal quality.